ST BERNARD'S WAY
by Andrew Richards

Oh Speak, Bernard, that we may hear it,
Proclaim the glorious mantra bliss,
Relate ecstatic flights of spirit,
Reveal to us the mystical kiss.

"I'll speak of Jesus," says the brother,
I'll speak the Name of Abundant Life,
For He gives love just like a mother,
His Blessed Name calms worldly strife."

O well you speak, and well you say,
How Mighty God became a man,
But teach us now the cosmic way,
We want a higher spiritual plan.

A higher Way than Jesus the Word?
I know no cosmic spiritual plan,
Higher than God to me is absurd,
We come to Life through Jesus the Man.

My soul rejects all spiritual food,
Not seasoned with His Holy Oil,
And houses of prayer soon collapse,
When planted in some other soil.

"For Jesus is honey to sweeten each hour,
His Name's a melody in one's ears,
His loving glance restores our power,
His Name within doth still our fears.

And always leaning on His Cross,
We find His Joy and never weep,
We learn to treasure worldly loss,
And speak His Name, or never speak.

. End

The substance of the mystical or "spiritual" marriage is experienced, as the name suggests, primarily in the soul. It is true that the whole man benefits from this transformation, and the body can and does regularly reflect and share in the good fortune of the spirit. On the other hand, there may be times after the marriage when the body seems to be suffering all by itself, while the spirit keeps joyful company with the celestial court.

The death of the Old Man means the flesh has been subdued and placed in proper subordination to the spirit. In this process, the power of "lust" to seduce the spirit has been "deadened" and reduced to a bare minimum. The Resurrection of the New Man in Jesus Christ has its center in the spirit, and the joys connected with it are far greater than those connected with the flesh. For the spirit has sensibilities of its own that are in no way dependent on its connection with the body. For this reason, there are no bodily hangovers connected with the joys of the spirit no matter their intensity, nor how long they last. And by the same token, the experience of spiritual inebriation connected with the inflowing of the Divine Spirit in the early stages of the Spiritual Marriage takes place in a central-region of the soul so exalted that it is almost completely immune to the comparative puny pleasures offered by sex or fleshly delights.

The spiritual transformation in Christ is a "New Thing" in one's experience. The spirit, itself, the saints tell us, becomes highlighted in one's consciousness as an entity distinct from the body. A "place," or region in one's spirit, about the size and location of the physical heart, comes into consciousness as the spiritual "center" from which God pours forth His Spirit.

In its initial stages, over several months, this outpouring from the center is a regular, ongoing experience, which inebriates the consciousness and makes attention to other activities very difficult. Over time, one becomes adjusted to this powerful Indwelling in one's center, and regains the capacity to perform other activities. However, one is more and more aware that one is imbued with a Supernatural Power and Love, not one's own by right, but a Gift from God. And simultaneously, one is aware that everything (natural and supernatural) comes from God, and without His Gifts, one is totally impotent when it comes to self-giving love of God or man. So one who, in truth, has no power nor ability of his own, finds that, by means of God's gifts, like St Dominic, St Ignatius, or Mother Teresa, he has the Power and Ability to "move mountains" and change the world, forever.

Father Arintero comments:

"The transformative delights experienced in the spirit are powerfully subtle and chaste and make all the pleasures of the flesh seem gross and insignificant by comparison. "For this reason, when you hear or read these things, remarked Philon, Bishop of Carpacia, you must understand that everything here is entirely pure, chaste, and sacred; they are the most divine communications of His celestial gifts, where there is nothing carnal or corruptible, base or gross, but rather everything is entirely virtuous. In this way you will prevent your soul from becoming stained or from receiving a mortal wound, where it could well find spiritual refection and a salutary medicine. For the spiritual kiss of God excels and surpasses physical pleasures as much as the light does the dark, as much as life does death, and the eternal the fleeting. For, just as there are physical kisses, so there are spiritual ones; the former carnal and corruptible, the later celestial and totally divine." (Fr. Juan G. Arintero, O.P.)

"In this state of mystical marriage, notes Fr. Luis de Leon, "the holy soul's humble recognition is that all the good and wealth she possesses is from God and for God. And so she says, if I am anything it is through the goodness of my Beloved that I am thus, and it is His desire and love for me that beautifies and enriches me."

"The mystical bride loses herself and all that is hers "leaving her cares...forgotten among the lilies," as St John of the Cross so divinely expressed it. Here the soul enjoys the continual presence of the Holy Trinity and scarcely does she recollect herself than she experiences the ineffable union and divine operation, that is, the very life of God infused into her own, and sees Him working and living in her as the soul of her life and the life of her soul. What we are describing is the regular, continual condition of the soul, other than on those few occasions when God temporarily withdraws to remind the soul of its misery and what it would be like to live without him.

"Before such wonders of divine love she enjoys ineffable delights, although she no longer loses the use of her senses and is comforted in such a way that she can receive these communications without neglecting the interests of her Spouse, but to all the rest she is as though alienated and oblivious. For this reason it does not occur to her to speak of lillies when they surround the "heap of wheat" with which she herself can feed many.

"He never forgets or abandons this happy soul but rather delights her and converses with her in such intimacy that it seems as though He has reserved all His affection adnd tendersness for her alone, as though He had no others to converse with, always looking at her, turning towards her with extreme pleasure to entertain and delight her and even in some way or other, to serve her as His Queen and the Mistress of His Heart.

"This," wrote the V. Mariana de San Jose, "is a state in which the soul derives so much from the Lord that it appears as though He forgets Himself in cherishing and regaling her to whom He wishes to unite Himself. And He does so in such sweet, friendly and merciful ways that they are far beyond our powers of description and can be understood only to a limited degree. His love and mercies are very strong chains and very swift wheels which rush the soul along into the arms of Him Who so sweetly calls her and so strongly binds her to Himself that even death itself cannot snatch her from Him."

"This is what the Bride means when she says that she is her beloved's and he has become wholly converted to her...which is the way in which the Lord inclines Himself and all riches to the soul, for it seems to Him that there is nothing richer than this soul, nor ever could there be. She is the mistress of the wealth of her Lord and God, "Whose power pacified all the people in her house who had caused in her such a state of disturbance." From now on she is so devoid of anything that is her own, that she no longer considers the love she feels in her soul to be her own, but to belong to her Master Who completely possesses her; thus the gifts which until now she seem to be receiving are no longer just "things received," but are, within a context of self-giving love, sure possessions."

"At these heights of mystical marriage not only does the soul belong wholly to the Spouse and the Spouse wholly to the soul but, apart from belonging to one another, they come to be inseparable and 'cohabit,' as it were, always looking after and attending to one another, "so that," writes Fr Juan de los Angeles,"all that I am , all my virtue, all my power, and all my strenghth comes from and belongs to the Beloved...He watches for me and attends to me. This certainly is something to be greatly wondered at by anyone who carefully considers the two; a soul and the Divine Word...The soul who sees God is seen by Him as if she were the only one upon whom He could fix His gaze; then she becomes modeled on Him and is transformed in His image.

"Full of trust she says that He is attending to her and she to Him...O Lord, how good You are to the soul who looks for You and who affectionately, discreetly and vigorously loves You! You betroth Yourself to her and go out to meet her with arms and heart open wide. O happy the soul who merits the blessing of such sweetness and who is given to experience the close and intimate embrace of such goodness!

"Do yo not see how great a source, from which it always receives, from which it always flows? Renouncing all other affections or attachments, the soul quite rightly occupies herself entirely in love, since love must be repaid with nothing but love."

"All the affection of the spouse is reserved for me, His heart is mine, in me He has His delights, and I am the sole object of all His thoughts and desires...It seems to every saintly soul...and this is how she is treated...as if the Divine Lover had no other soul to entertain; for infinite Love is communicated to each soul as if she were the only one.

"Now it seems to me," wrote the V. Mariana de San Jose' about herself, "that never will He leave me nor I leave Him, because the bonds of His love are very tight, and communication is of a much greater perfection than that known until now. It is such a brotherly and friendly relationship that it is impossible to make any meaningful comparison with any enjoyed in this life. Recently He seems to thank me in a very pleasing way for what I do through my own efforts, showing Himself to be indebted to me when I look to my own salvation and sanctification, and He brings me to feel this in such a way that I forget I am a part of it, that it has to do with me, as if I were nothing more than a neighbor whose health and well-being I am concerned about, seeing how much this Lord loves her.

"In this way He has given me such great dominion that in all truth and security I tend to my own needs through the Lord Who so lovingly cares for me. He has taught me how I must give assistance through Him and not from my own resources, and has done so in words so tender that they cannot be repeated, nor have I the strength to do so."

"Here then, all the soul's desires are satisfied, in as far as this is possible in this life; for she has now succeeded in receiving the mystical kiss for which she so longed, and has become so intimately united with her God, her only source of happiness, that she has become one single spirit with Him. She now not only works in all things with the power of Christ, and is moved by His Spirit, but is so possessed of this Divine Spirit as Lord and Giver of Life,that she seems to live the life of Christ: He living in her rather than she in herself. This demands such an intimate kind of renewal and transformation that it affects not only the faculites but also the very essence of the soul, for it is a true process of deification.

"All the great mystics agree that no words are able to communicate the perfection of this state and the intimacy of this happy union. They compare the soul to a sponge soaked in the water of the sea, to an iron placed in the fire, to two candles standing so close together that they give off a single flame...but they believe they are still far from explaining it. St Teresa describes it as a drop of water which falls and joins the water of a river from which it can never be separated, or as the light which, entering through two sindows, lights up a room; "It is impossible to say more than that; as far as one can understand, the soul(I mean the spirit of this soul) is made one with God."

"Here the holy soul," says Blosius, "dissolves and swoons; dead to herself, she now lives only for God...So that she who previously was cold now burns; she who was dark now shines; she who was hard-hearted is now soft."(It should be noted, states A.R., that man's natural spirit seems to consciousness to have fixed dimensions with outer walls that can be toughened or softened at will. The proud man "wills" to have hard-hearted walls which make him believe he is self-sufficient and invulnerable, and which rigidly control the coming and going to his sensitive inner self. The humble man wills to have soft walls which expose his vulnerability and make him realize his need for other's love and his very real dependency on Almighty God.)

On the other hand, continues A.R., the Spirit of God is experienced coming into man's consciousness as as a "soft," tender, vulnerable and Loving Spirit of unending softness(humility) clearly distinct from one's own. This "softness" is mentioned because "spiritual softness" is a regular factor in the actual experience of Ongoing Infinity, Otherness, and Bliss connected with the experience or quasi-experience of Infinite Spirit. The experience of one's own natural spirit, on the other hand, at least before the Spiritual Marriage, is an experience of spirit with solid limits, rather than one with unending softness. Read again what Blosius says about mystical union:

"Here the holy soul," says Blosius, "dissolves" and swoons; dead to herself, she now lives only for God...So that she who previously was cold now burns; she who was dark now shines; "she who was hard-hearted is now soft."

Man's ability to give and receive natural love seems determined by the limited capacity within the natural dimensions of his spirit, and the "hardness" or "softness" of the walls of his personality. On the other hand, God's ability to give and receive supernatural love seems unlimited, just like His Spirit. When God unites with man's spirit, man's identifies with the Infinite loving softness, or humility of God, and seems to take on His Power and an unending capacity for Self-Giving Love. This latter Power is received by man as a Gift, in the purity of complete humility or softness. If man is still imbued with hard-hearted walls or pride, he is incapable of the full-receptivity necessary to receive God's gift of Himself.

"While previously, continues V. Mariana de San Jose, "she found it so very difficult to leave the quiet of contemplation, now she does so with the greatest ease, as though moved by a higher force which urges her to help the needs of her neighbors. She now has no other ambitions or desires but those of her sweet Master.

"For this reason she herself now invites the Spouse to go and visit His property and see the state of His possessions and to meet whatever needs are encountered. She now wants to go, not to her garden, but into the country, everywhere, so that all will be made to feel the beneficial influence of His presence and the fountain of blessings that she now carries within her always. Although she seems to travel the world alone, and seems to have abandoned the sweet retreat of contemplation, she in fact has excellent company, being accompanied in inner recollection by her Beloved Whom she never ceases to contemplatie and Who bestows virtue and efficacy upon all her works. Thus, she enjoys more or less the continual presence and sweet company of Jesus and communicates it to others without ever separating herself from Him for a single moment.(from Fr. Juan Arintero, O.P., Song of Songs)

Evelyn Underhill has some interesting comments on the "deified" life:

"For the most subtle and delicate descriptions of the Unitive or Deified State, understood as self-loss in the "Ocean Pacific" of God, we must go to the great genius of Ruysbroeck. He alone, whilst avoiding all its pitfalls, has conveyed the suggestion of its ineffable joys in a measure which seems, as we read, to be beyond all that we had supposed possible to human utterance. Awe and rapture, theological profundity, keen psychological insight, are here tempered by a touching simplicity. We listen to the report of one who has indeed heard "the invitation of love" which "draws interior souls towards the One" and says "Come home.

" A humble receptivity, a meek self-naughting is with Ruysbroeck, as with all great mystics, the gate of the City of God. "Because they have abandoned themselves to God in doing, in leaving undone, and in suffering," he says of the deified souls, "they have steadfast peace and inward joy, consolation and savour, of which the world cannot partake; neither any dissembler, nor the man who seeks and means himself more than the glory of God. Moreover, those same inward and enlightened men have before them in their inward seeing, whenever they will, the Love of God as something drawing or urging them into the Unity; for they see and feel that the Father with the Son through the Holy Ghost, embrace Each Other and all the chosen, and draw themselves back with eternal love into the unity of Their Nature.

"Thus the Unity is ever drawing to itself and inviting to itself everything that has been born of It, either by nature or by grace. And therefore, too, such enlightened men are, with a free spirit, lifted up above reason into a bare and imageless vision, wherein lives the eternal indrawing summons of the Divine Unity; and, with an imageless and bare understanding, they pass through all works, and all exercises, and all things, until they reach the summit of their spirits. There, their bare understanding is drenched through by the Eternal Brightness, even as the air is drenched through by the sunshine. And the bare, uplifted will is transformed and drenched through by abysmal love, even as iron is by fire.

"And the bare, uplifted memory feels itself enwrapped and established in an abysmal Absence of Image. And thereby the created image is united above reason in a threefold way with its Eternal Image, which is the origin of its being and its life. . . . Yet the creature does not become God, for the union takes place in God through grace and our homeward-turning love: and therefore the creature in its inward contemplation feels a distinction and an otherness between itself and God. And though the union is without means, yet the manifold works which God works in heaven and on earth are nevertheless hidden from the spirit. For though God gives Himself as He is, with clear discernment, He gives Himself in the essence of the soul, where the powers of the soul are simplified above reason, and where, in simplicity, they suffer the transformation of God. There all is full and overflowing, for the spirit feels itself to be one truth and one richness and one unity with God. Yet even here there is an essential tending forward, and therein is an essential distinction between the being of the soul and the Being of God; and this is the highest and finest distinction which we are able to feel."

"When love has carried us above and beyond all things," he says in another place, "above the light, into the Divine Dark, there we are wrought and transformed by the Eternal Word Who is the image of the Father; and as the air is penetrated by the sun, thus we receive in idleness of spirit the Incomprehensible Light, enfolding us and penetrating us. And this flight is nothing else but an infinite gazing and seeing. We behold that which we are, and we are that which be behold; because our thought, life and being are uplifted in simplicity and made one with the Truth which is God."

"Here the personal aspect of the Absolute seems to be reduced to a minimum: yet all that we value in personality--love, action, will--remains unimpaired. We seem caught up to a plane of vision beyond the categories of the human mind: to the contemplation of a Something Other--our home, our hope, and our passion, the completion of our personality, and the Substance of all that Is. Such an endless contemplation, such a dwelling within the substance of Goodness, Truth and, Beauty, is the essence of that Beatific Vision, that participation of Eternity, "of all things most delightful and desired, of all things most loved by them who have it," which theology presents to us as the objective of the soul.

"Those mystics of the metaphysical type who tend to use these impersonal symbols of Place and Thing often see in the Unitive Life a foretaste of the Beatific Vision: an entrance here and now into that absolute life within the Divine Being, which shall be lived by all perfect spirits when they have cast off the limitations of the flesh and re-entered the eternal order for which they were made. For them, in fact, the "deified man," in virtue of his genius for transcendental reality, has run ahead of human history: and attained a form of consciousness which other men will only know when earthly life is past.

"In the "Book of Truth" Suso has a beautiful and poetic comparison between the life of the blessed spirits dwelling within the Ocean of Divine Love, and that approximate life which is lived on earth by the mystic who has renounced all selfhood and merged his will in that of the Eternal Truth. Here we find one of the best of many answers to the ancient but apparently immortal accusation that the mystics teach the total annihilation of personality as the end and object of their quest. "Lord, tell me," says the Servitor, "what remains to a blessed soul which has wholly renounced itself." Truth says, "When the good and faithful servant enters into the joy of his Lord, he is inebriated by the riches of the house of God; for he feels, in an ineffable degree, that which is felt by an inebriated man. He forgets himself, he is no longer conscious of his selfhood; he disappears and loses himself in God, and becomes one spirit with Him, as a drop of water which is drowned in a great quantity of wine. For even as such a drop disappears, taking the colour and the taste of wine, so it is with those who are in full possession of blessedness.

"All human desires are taken from them in an indescribable manner, they are rapt from themselves, and are immersed in the Divine Will. If it were otherwise, if there remained in the man some human thing that was not absorbed, those words of Scripture which say that God must be all in all would be false. His being remains, but in another form, in another glory, and in another power. And all this is the result of entire and complete renunciation. . . . Herein thou shalt find an answer to thy question; for the true renunciation and veritable abandonment of a man to the Divine Will in the temporal world is an imitation and reduction of that self-abandonment of the blessed, of which Scripture speaks: and this imitation approaches its model more or less, according as men are more or less united with God and become more or less one with God.

"All the mystics agree that the stripping off of the I, the Me, the Mine, utter renouncement, or "self-naughting"--self-abandonment to the direction of a larger Will--is an imperative condition of the attainment of the unitive life. The temporary denudation of the mind, whereby the contemplative made space for the vision of God, must now be applied to the whole life. Here, they say, there is a final swallowing up of that wilful I-hood, that surface individuality which we ordinarily recognize as ourselves.(Old Man) It goes for ever, and something new is established in its room. The self is made part of the mystical Body of God;(New Man) and, humbly taking its place in the corporate life of Reality, would "fain be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man."

"That strange "hunger and thirst of God for the soul," "at once avid and generous," of which they speak in their profoundest passages, here makes its final demand and receives its satisfaction. "All that He has, all that He is He gives: all that we have, all that we are, He takes." The self, they declare, is devoured, immersed in the Abyss; "sinks into God, Who is the deep of deeps." In their efforts towards describing to us this, the supreme mystic act, and the new life to which it gives birth, they are often driven to the use of images which must seem to us grotesque, were it not for the flame which burns behind: as when Ruysbroeck cries, "To eat and be eaten! this is Union! . . . Since His desire is without measure, to be devour of of Him does not greatly amaze me."

"What the mystic here desires to tell us is, that his new life is not only a free and conscious participation in the life of Eternity--a fully-established existence on real and transcendental levels--but also the conscious sharing of an inflowing personal life greater than his own; a tightening of the bonds of that companionship which has been growing in intimacy and splendour during the course of the Mystic Way. This companionship, at once the most actual and most elusive fact of human experience, is utterly beyond the resources of speech. So too are those mysteries of the communion of love, whereby the soul's humble, active and ever-renewed self-donation becomes the occasion of her glory: and "by her love she is made the equal of Love"--the beggar maid sharing Cophetua's throne.

"The simplest expression of the Unitive Life, the simplest interpretation which we can put on its declarations, is that it is the complete and conscious fulfilment here and now of this Perfect Love. In it certain elect spirits, still in the flesh, "fly high and yet more high," till "taught and led out of themselves," they become, in the exaggerated language of the "Mirror," "God by condition of love." Home-grown English mysticism tried as a rule to express the inexpressible in homelier, more temperate terms than this. "I would that thou knew," says the unknown author of the "Epistle of Prayer," "what manner of working it is that knitteth man's soul to God, and that maketh it one with Him in love and accordance of will after the word of St. Paul, saying thus: `Qui adhaeret Deo, unus spiritus est cum illo'; that is to say: `Whoso draweth near to God as it is by such a reverent affection touched before, he is one spirit with God.'

"That is, though all that God and he be two and sere in kind, nevertheless yet in grace they are so knit together that they are but one in spirit; and all this is one for onehead of love and accordance of will; and in this onehead is the marriage made between God and the soul the which shall never be broken, though all that the heat and the fervour of this work cease for a time, but by a deadly sin. In the ghostly feeling of this onehead may a loving soul both say and sing (if it list) this holy word that is written in the Book of Songs in the Bible, `Dilectus meus mihi et ego illi,' that is, My loved unto me, and I unto Him; understanding that God shall be knitted with the ghostly glue of grace on His party, and the lovely consent in gladness of spirit on thy party."

"I think no one can deny that the comparison of the bond between the soul and the Absolute to "ghostly glue," though crude, is wholly innocent. Its appearance in this passage as an alternative to the symbol of wedlock may well check the uncritical enthusiasm of those who hurry to condemn at sight all "sexual" imagery. That it has seemed to the mystics appropriate and exact is proved by its reappearance in the next century in the work of a greater contemplative. "Thou givest me," says Petersen, "Thy whole Self to be mine whole and undivided, if at least I shall be Thine whole and undivided. And when I shall be thus all Thine, even as from everlasting Thou hast loved Thyself, so from everlasting Thou hast loved me: for this means nothing more than that Thou enjoyest Thyself in me, and that I by Thy grace enjoy Thee in myself and myself in Thee. And when in Thee I shall love myself, nothing else but Thee do I love, because Thou art in me and I in Thee, glued together as one and the selfsame thing, which henceforth and forever cannot be divided."

"From this kind of language to that of the Spiritual Marriage, as understood by the pure minds of the mystics, is but a step. They mean by it no rapturous satisfactions, no dubious spiritualizing of earthly ecstasies, but a life-long bond "that shall never be lost or broken," a close personal union of will and of heart between the free self and that "Fairest in Beauty" Whom it has known in the act of contemplation.

"The Mystic Way has been a progress, a growth in love: a deliberate fostering of the inward tendency of the soul towards its source, an eradication of its disorderly tendencies to "temporal goods." But the only proper end of love is union: "a perfect uniting and coupling together of the lover and the loved into one." It is "a unifying principle," the philosophers say: life's mightiest agent upon every plane. Moreover, just as earthly marriage is understood by the moral sense less as a satisfaction of personal desire, than as a part of the great process of life--the fusion of two selves for new purposes--so such spiritual marriage brings with it duties and obligations. With the attainment of a new order, the new infusion of vitality, comes a new responsibility, the call to effort and endurance on a new and mighty scale. It is not an act but a state.

"Fresh life is imparted, by which our lives are made complete: new creative powers are conferred. The self, lifted to the divine order, is to be an agent of the divine fecundity: an energizing centre, a parent of transcendental life. "The last perfection," says Aquinas, "to supervene upon a thing, is its becoming the cause of other things. While then a creature tends by many ways to the likeness of God, the last way left open to it is to seek the divine likeness by being the cause of other things, according to what the Apostle says, Dei enim sumus adjutores."

"We find as a matter of fact, when we come to study the history of the mystics, that the permanent Unitive State, or spiritual marriage, does mean for those who attain to it, above all else such an access of creative vitality. It means man's small derivative life invaded and enhanced by the Absolute Life: the appearance in human history of personalities and careers which seem superhuman when judged by the surface mind. Such activity, such a bringing forth of "the fruits of the Spirit," may take many forms: but where it is absent, where we meet with personal satisfactions, personal visions or raptures--however sublime and spiritualized--presented as marks of the Unitive Way, ends or objects of the quest of Reality, we may be sure that we have wandered from the "strait and narrow road" which leads, not to eternal rest, but to Eternal Life.

. "When we look at the lives of the great theopathetic mystics, the true initiates of Eternity--inarticulate as these mystics often are--we find ourselves in the presence of an amazing, a superabundant vitality: of a "triumphing force" over which circumstance has no power. The incessant production of good works seems indeed to be the object of that Spirit, by Whose presence their interior castle is now filled.

"We see St. Paul, abruptly enslaved by the First and Only Fair, not hiding himself to enjoy the vision of Reality, but going out single-handed to organize the Catholic Church. We ask how it was possible for an obscure Roman citizen, without money, influence, or good health, to lay these colossal foundations: and he answers "Not I, but Christ in me."

"We see St. Joan of Arc, a child of the peasant class, leaving the sheepfold to lead the armies of France. We ask how this incredible thing can be: and are told "Her Voices bade her." A message, an overpowering impulse, came from the supra-sensible: vitality flowed in on her, she knew not how or why. She was united with the Infinite Life, and became Its agent, the medium of Its strength, "what his own hand is to a man."

"We see St. Francis, "God's troubadour," marked with His wounds, inflamed with His joy--obverse and reverse of the earnest-money of eternity--or St. Ignatius Loyola, our Lady's knight, a figure at once militant and romantic, go out to change the spiritual history of Europe. Where did they find--born and bred to the most ordinary of careers, in the least spiritual of atmospheres--that superabundant energy, that genius for success which triumphed best in the most hopeless situations? Francis found it before the crucifix in St. Damiano, and renewed it in the ineffable experience of La Verna; when "by mental possession and rapture he was transfigured of God." Ignatius found it in the long contemplations and hard discipline of the cave of Manresa, after the act of surrender in which he dedicated his knighthood to the service of the Mother of God.

"We see St. Teresa, another born romantic, pass to the Unitive State after long and bitter struggles between her lower and higher personality. A chronic invalid over fifty years of age, weakened by long ill-health and the mortifications of the Purgative Way she deliberately breaks with her old career in obedience to the inward Voice, leaves her convent, and starts a new life: coursing through Spain, and reforming a great religious order in the teeth of the ecclesiastical world. Yet more amazing, St. Catherine of Siena, an illiterate daughter of the people, after a three years' retreat consummates the mystic marriage, and emerges from the cell of self-knowledge to dominate the politics of Italy.

"How came it that these apparently unsuitable men and women, checked on every side by inimical environment, ill-health, custom, or poverty achieved these stupendous destinies? The explanation can only lie in the fact that all these persons were great mystics, living upon high levels the theopathetic life. In each a character of the heroic type, of great vitality, deep enthusiasms, unconquerable will, was raised to the spiritual plane, remade on higher levels of consciousness. Each by surrender of selfhood, by acquiescence in the large destinies of life, had so furthered that self's natural genius for the Infinite that their human limitations were overpassed. Hence they rose to freedom and attained to the one ambition of the "naughted soul," "I would fain be to the Eternal Goodness what his own hand is to a man."

"This new, intense, and veritable life has other and even more vital characteristics than those which lead to "the performance of acts" or "the incessant production of good works." It is, in an actual sense, as Richard of St. Victor reminded us, fertile, creative, as well as merely active. In the fourth degree of love, the soul brings forth its children. It is the agent of a fresh outbirth of spiritual vitality into the world; the helpmate of the Transcendent Order, the mother of a spiritual progeny. The great unitive mystics are each of them the founders of spiritual families, centres wherefrom radiates new transcendental life. The "flowing light of the Godhead" is focussed in them, as in a lens, only that it may pass through them to spread out on every side.

"So, too, the great creative seers and artists are the parents, not merely of their own immediate works, but also of whole schools of art, whole groups of persons who acquire or inherit their vision of beauty or truth. Thus within the area of influence of a Paul, a Francis, an Ignatius, a Teresa, an atmosphere of reality is created; and new and vital spiritual personalities gradually appear, meet for the work which these great founders set in hand. The real witness to St. Paul's ecstatic life in God, is the train of Christian churches by which his journeyings are marked. Wherever Francis passed, he left Franciscans, "fragrant with a wondrous aspect," where none had been before." "This reproductive power is one of the greatest marks of the theopathetic life: the true "mystic marriage" of the individual soul with its Source. Those rare personalities in whom it is found are the media through which that Triumphing Spiritual Life which is the essence of reality forces an entrance into the temporal order and begets children; heirs of the superabundant vitality of the transcendental universe.

"But the Unitive Life is more than the sum total of its symptoms: more than the heroic and apostolic life of the "great active": more than the divine motherhood of new "sons and daughters of the Absolute." These are only its outward signs, its expression in time and space. I have first laid stress upon that expression, because it is the side which all critics and some friends of the mystics persistently ignore. The contemplative's power of living this intense and creative life within the temporal order, however, is tightly bound up with that other life in which he attains to complete communion with the Absolute Order, and submits to the inflow of its supernal vitality. In discussing the relation of the mystical experience to philosophy, we saw that the complete mystic consciousness, and therefore, of course, the complete mystic world, had a twofold character which could hardly be reconciled with the requirements of monism. It embraced a Reality which seems from the human standpoint at once static and dynamic, transcendent and immanent, eternal and temporal: accepted both the absolute World of Pure Being and the unresting World of Becoming as integral parts of its vision of Truth, demanding on its side a dual response.

"All through the Mystic Way we caught glimpses of the growth and exercise of this dual intuition of the Real. Now, the mature mystic, having come to his full stature, passed through the purifications of sense and of spirit and entered on his heritage, must and does take up as a part of that heritage not merely (a) a fruition of the Divine Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, his place within the Sempiternal Rose, nor (b) the creative activity of an agent of the Eternal Wisdom, still immersed in the River of Life: but both together--the twofold destiny of the spiritual man, called to "incarnate the Eternal in time." To use the old scholastic language, he is at once patient and agent: (although his free-will cooperation is necessary, the mystic is primarily)patient as regards God, agent as regards the world.

"In a deep sense it may be said of him that he now participates according to his measure in that divine-human life which mediates between man and the Eternal, and constitutes the "salvation of the world." Therefore, though his outward heroic life of action, his divine fecundity, may seem to us the best evidence of his state, it is the inner knowledge of his mystical sonship whereby "we feel eternal life in us above all other thing," which is for him the guarantee of absolute life. He has many ways of describing this central fact; this peculiar consciousness of his own(participaion in) transcendence, which coexists with, and depends on, a complete humility. Sometimes he says that whereas in the best moments of his natural life he was but the "faithful servant" of the eternal order, and in the illuminated way became its "secret friend," he is now advanced to the final, most mysterious state of "hidden child."

"How great," says Ruysbroeck, "is the difference between the secret friend and the hidden child! For the friend makes only loving, living, but measured ascents towards God. But the child presses on to lose his own life upon the summits, in that simplicity which knoweth not itself. . . . When we transcend ourselves and become in our ascent towards God so simple that the bare supreme Love can lay hold of us, then we cease, and we and all our selfhood die in God. And in this death we become the hidden children of God, and find a new life within us."

"Though the outer career of the great mystic, then, be one of superhuman industry, a long fight with evil and adversity, his real and inner life dwells securely upon the heights; in the perfect fruition which he can only suggest to us by the paradoxical symbols of ignorance and emptiness. He dominates existence because he thus transcends it: is a son of God, a member of the eternal order, shares its substantial life. "Tranquillity according to His essence, activity according to His Nature: absolute repose, absolute fecundity": this, says Ruysbroeck again, is the twofold property of Godhead: and the secret child of the Absolute participates in this dual character of Reality--"for this dignity has man been made."

"Those two aspects of truth which he has so clumsily classified as static and dynamic, as Being and Becoming, now find their final reconciliation within his own nature: for that nature has become conscious in all its parts, has unified itself about its highest elements. That strange, tormenting vision of a perfect peace, a joyous self-loss, annihilation in some mighty Life that overpassed his own, which haunts man throughout the whole course of his history, and finds a more or less distorted expression in all his creeds, a justification in all his ecstasies, is now traced to its source: and found to be the inevitable expression of an instinct by which he recognized, though he could not attain, the noblest part of his inheritance. This recognition of his has of necessity been imperfect and oblique. It has taken in many temperaments an exaggerated form, and has been further disguised by the symbolic language used to describe it.

"The tendency of Indian mysticism(and Buddhism) to regard the Unitive Life wholly in its passive aspect, as a total self-annihilation, a disappearance into the substance of the Godhead, results, I believe, from such a distortion of truth. The Oriental mystic "presses on to lose his life upon the heights"; but he does not come back and bring to his fellow-men the life-giving news that he has transcended mortality in the interests of the race. The temperamental bias of Western mystics towards activity has saved them as a rule from such one-sided achievement as this; and hence it is in them that the Unitive Life, with its "dual character of activity and rest," has assumed its richest and noblest forms.

. "In the theopathetic mystics... indeed, "action has not injured fruition, nor fruition action," who have by some secret adjustment contrived to "possess their lives in rest and in work" without detriment to inward joy or outward industry. Bear in mind as you read these words--Ruysbroeck's supreme effort to tell the true relation between man's created spirit and his God--the great public ministry of St. Catherine of Siena, which ranged from the tending of the plague-stricken to the reforming of the Papacy; and was accompanied by the inward fruitive consciousness of the companionship of Christ. Remember the humbler but not less beautiful and significant achievement of her Genoese namesake: the strenuous lives of St. Francis of Assisi, St. Ignatius, St. Teresa, outwardly cumbered with much serving, observant of an infinitude of tiresome details, composing rules, setting up foundations, neglecting no aspect of their business which could conduce to its practical success, yet "altogether dwelling in God in restful fruition."

"Are not all these supreme examples of the state in which the self, at last fully conscious, knowing Reality because she is wholly real, pays her debt? Unable to rest entirely either in work or in fruition, she seizes on this twofold expression of the superabundant life by which she is possessed: and, on the double wings of eagerness and effort, takes flight towards her Home.

"In dwelling, as we have done, on the ways in which the great mystic makes actual to himself the circumstances of the Unitive State, we must not forget that this state is, in essence, a fulfilment of love; the attainment of a "heart's desire." By this attainment, this lifting of the self to free union with the Real--as by the earthly marriage which dimly prefigures it--a new life is entered upon, new powers, new responsibilities are conferred. But this is not all. The three prime activities of the normal self, feeling, intellect, and will, though they seem to be fused, are really carried up to a higher term. They are unified, it is true, but still present in their integrity; and each demands and receives full satisfaction in the attainment of this fillal "honour for which man has been made."

"The intellect is immersed in that mighty vision of truth, known now not as a vision but as a home; where St. Paul saw things which might not be uttered, St. Teresa found the "perpetual companionship of the Blessed Trinity," and Dante, caught to its heart for one brief moment, his mind smitten by the blinding flash of the Uncreated light, knew that he had resolved Reality's last paradox: the unity of "cerchio" and "imago"--the infinite and personal aspects of God. The enhanced will, made over to the interests of the Transcendent, receives new worlds to conquer, new strength to match its exalted destiny. But the heart too here enters on a new order, begins to live upon high levels of joy. "This soul, says Love, swims in the sea of joy: that is, in the sea of delight, the stream of divine influences."

"Amans volat, currit et laetatur: liber est et non tenetur,"[897] said à Kempis: classic words, which put before us once and for ever the inward joyousness and liberty of the saints. They "fly, run, and rejoice"--those great, laborious souls, often spent with amazing mortifications, vowed to hard and never-ending tasks. They are "free, and nothing can hold them," though they seem to the world fenced in by absurd renunciations and restrictions, deprived of that cheap licence which it knows as liberty.

"That fruition of joy of which Ruysbroeck speaks in majestic phrases, as constituting the interior life of mystic souls immersed in the Absolute...is often realized in the secret experience of those same mystics, as the perennial possession of a childlike gaiety, an inextinguishable gladness of heart. The transfigured souls move to the measures of a "love dance" which persists in mirth without comparison, through every outward hardship and tribulation. They enjoy the high spirits peculiar to high spirituality: and shock the world by a delicate playfulness, instead of exhibiting the morose resignation which it feels to be proper to the "spiritual life." Thus St. Catherine of Siena, though constantly suffering, "was always jocund and of a happy spirit." When prostrate with illness she overflowed with gaiety and gladness, and "was full of laughter in the Lord, exultant and rejoicing. "

"Moreover, the most clear-sighted amongst the mystics declare such joy to be an implicit of Reality. Thus Dante, initiated into Paradise, sees the whole Universe laugh with delight as it glorifies God: and the awful countenance of Perfect Love adorned with smiles. Thus the souls of the great theologians dance to music and laughter in the Heaven of the Sun; the loving seraphs, in their ecstatic joy, whirl about the Being of God. "O luce sterna che . . . ami ed arridi," exclaims the pilgrim, as the Divine Essence is at last revealed to him, and he perceives love and joy as the final attributes of the Triune God. Thus Beatrice with "suoi occhi ridenti"--so different from the world's idea of a suitable demeanour for the soul's supreme instructress--laughs as she mounts with him the ladder to the stars.

"Richard Rolle has expressed this exultant "spirit of dalliance" with peculiar insight and delicacy. "Among the delights which he tastes in so sweet love burning," he says of the true lover who "in the bond of the lovers' will stably is confirmed," "a heavenly privity inshed he feels, that no man can know but he that has received it, and in himself bears the electuary that anoints and makes happy all joyful lovers in Jesu; so that they cease not to hie in heavenly seats to sit, endlessly their Maker to enjoy. Hereto truly they yearn in heavenly sights abiding; and inwardly set afire, all their inward parts are glad with pleasant shining in light. And themselves they feel gladdened with merriest love, and in joyful song wonderfully melted. . . .

"But this grace generally and to all is not given, but to the holy soul imbued with the holiest is taught; in whom the excellence of love shines, and songs of lovely loving, Christ inspiring, commonly burst up, and being made as it were a pipe of love, in sight of God more goodly than can be said, joying sounds. The which (soul) the mystery of love knowing, with great cry to its Love ascends, in wit sharpest, and in knowledge and in feeling subtle; not spread in things of this world but into God all gathered and set, that in cleanness of conscience and shining of soul to Him it may serve Whom it has purposed to love, and itself to Him to give. Surely the clearer the love of the lover is, the nearer to him and the more present God is. And thereby more clearly in God he joys, and of the sweet Goodness the more he feels, that to lovers is wont Itself to inshed, and to mirth without comparison the hearts of the meek to turn."

"The state of burning love, said Rolle, than which he could conceive no closer reaction to Reality, was the state of Sweetness and Song: the welling up of glad music in the simple soul, man's natural expression of a joy which overpasses the descriptive powers of our untuneful speech. In the gay rhythms of that primordial art he may say something of the secret which the more decorous periods of religion and philosophy will never let him tell: something, too, which in its very childishness, its freedom from the taint of solemnity and self-importance, expresses the quality of that inward life, that perpetual youth, which the "secret child" of the Transcendent Order enjoys. "As it were a pipe of love" in the sight of God he "joying sounds." The music of the spheres is all about him: he is a part of the great melody of the Divine. "Sweetest forsooth," says Rolle again, "is the rest which the spirit takes whilst sweet goodly sound comes down, in which it is delighted: and in most sweet song and playful the mind is ravished to sing likings of love everlasting."

" When we come to look at the lives of the mystics, we find it literally true that such "songs of lovely loving commonly burst up" whenever we can catch them unawares; see behind the formidable and heroic activities of reformer, teacher, or leader of men the vie intime which is lived at the hearth of Love. "What are the servants of the Lord but His minstrels?" said St. Francis, who saw nothing inconsistent between the Celestial Melodies and the Stigmata of Christ. Moreover the songs of such troubadours, as the hermit of Hampole learned in his wilderness, are not only sweet but playful. Dwelling always in a light of which we hardly dare to think, save in the extreme terms of reverence and awe, they are not afraid with any amazement: they are at home.

"The whole life of St. Francis of Assisi, that spirit transfigured in God, who "loved above all other birds a certain little bird which is called the lark," was one long march to music through the world. To sing seemed to him a primary spiritual function: he taught his friars in their preaching to urge all men to this. It appeared to him appropriate and just to use the romantic language of the troubadours in praise of the perfect Love which had marked him as Its own. "Drunken with the love and compassion of Christ, blessed Francis on a time did things such as these. For the most sweet melody of spirit boiling up within him, frequently broke out in French speech, and the veins of murmuring which he heard secretly with his ears broke forth into French-like rejoicing. And sometimes he picked up a branch from the earth, and laying it on his left arm, he drew in his right hand another stick like a bow over it, as if on a viol or other instrument, and, making fitting gestures, sang with it in French unto the Lord Jesus Christ."

"Many a time has the romantic quality of the Unitive Life--its gaiety, freedom, assurance, and joy--broken out in "French-like rejoicings"; which have a terribly frivolous sound for worldly ears, and seem the more preposterous as coming from people whose outward circumstances are of the most uncomfortable kind. St. John of the Cross wrote love songs to his Love. St. Rose of Lima sang duets with the birds. St. Teresa, in the austere and poverty-stricken seclusion of her first foundation, did not disdain to make rustic hymns and carols for her daughters' use in the dialect of Old Castile. Like St. Francis, she had a horror of(unnatural) solemnity. It was only fit for hypocrites, thought these rejuvenators of the Church. The hard life of prayer and penance on Mount Carmel was undertaken in a joyous spirit to the sound of many songs. Its great Reformer was quick to snub the too-spiritual sister who "thought it better to contemplate than to sing": and was herself heard, as she swept the convent corridor, to sing a little ditty about the most exalted of her own mystical experiences: that ineffable transverberation, in which the fiery arrow of the seraph pierced her heart.

"But the most lovely and real, most human and near to us, of all these descriptions of the celestial exhilaration which mystic surrender brings in its train, is the artless, unintentional self-revelation of St. Catherine of Genoa, whose inner and outer lives in their balanced wholeness provide us with one of our best standards by which to judge the right proportions of the Mystic Way. Here the whole essence of the Unitive Life is summed up and presented to us by one who lived it upon heroic levels: and who was, in fruition and activity, in rest and in work, not only a great active and a great ecstatic, but one of the deepest gazers into the secrets of Eternal Love that the history of Christian mysticism contains. Yet perhaps there is no passage in the works of these same mystics which comes to so unexpected, so startling a conclusion as this; in which St. Catherine, with a fearless simplicity, shows to her fellow-men the nature of the path that she has trodden and the place that she has reached.

"When," she says, in one of her reported dialogues--and though the tone be impersonal it is clearly personal experience which speaks--"the loving kindness of God calls a soul from the world, He finds it full of vices and sins; and first He gives it an instinct for virtue, and then urges it to perfection, and then by infused grace leads it to true self-naughting, and at last to true transformation. And this noteworthy order serves God to lead the soul along the Way: but when the soul is naughted and transformed, then of herself she neither works nor speaks nor wills, nor feels nor hears nor understands, neither has she of herself the feeling of outward or inward, where she may move. And in all things it is God Who rules and guides her, without the mediation of any creature.

"And the state of this soul is then a feeling of such utter peace and tranquillity that it seems to her that her heart, and her bodily being, and all both within and without is immersed in an ocean of utmost peace; from when she shall never come forth for anything that can befall her in this life. And she stays immovable, imperturbable, impassible. So much so, that it seems to her in her human and her spiritual nature, both within and without, she can feel no other thing than sweetest peace. And she is so full of peace that though she press her flesh, her nerves, her bones, no other thing comes forth from them than peace. Then says she all day for joy such rhymes as these, making them according to her manner:--

"Then says she all day for joy such rhymes as these"--nursery rhymes, one might almost call them: so infantile, so naive is their rhythm. Who would have suspected this to be the secret manner of communion between the exalted soul of Catherine and her Love? How many of those who actually saw that great and able woman labouring in the administration of her hospital--who heard that profound and instinctive Christian Platonist instructing her disciples, and declaring the law of universal and heroic love--how many of these divined that "questa santa benedetta" who seemed to them already something more than earthly, a matter of solemn congratulation and reverential approach, went about her work with a heart engaged in no lofty speculations on Eternity; no outpourings of mystic passion for the Absolute; but "saying all day for joy," in a spirit of childlike happiness, gay and foolish little songs about her Love?

"Standing at the highest point of the mystic ladder which can be reached by human spirits in this world of time and space, looking back upon the course of that slow interior alchemy, that "noteworthy order" of organic transformation, by which her selfhood had been purged of imperfection, raised to higher levels, compelled at last to surrender itself to the all-embracing, all-demanding life of the Real; this is St. Catherine's deliberate judgment on the relative and absolute aspects of the mystic life. The "noteworthy order" which we have patiently followed, the psychic growth and rearrangement of character, the visions and ecstasies, the joyous illumination and bitter pain--these but "served to lead the soul along the way."

" In the mighty transvaluation of values which takes place when that way has at last been trod, these "abnormal events" sink to insignificance. For us, looking out wistfully along the pathway to reality, they stand out, it is true, as supreme landmarks, by which we may trace the homeward course of pilgrim man. Their importance cannot be overrated for those who would study the way to that world from this. But the mystic, safe in that silence where lovers lose themselves, "his cheek on Him Who for his coming came," remembers them no more. In the midst of his active work, his incessant spiritual creation, joy and peace enfold him. He needs no stretched and sharpened intuition now: for he dwells in that "most perfect form of contemplation" which "consists in simple and perceived contact of the substance of the soul with that of the divine."

"The wheel of life has made its circle. Here, at the last point of its revolution, the extremes of sublimity and simplicity are seen to meet. It has swept the soul of the mystic through periods of alternate stress and glory; tending ever to greater transcendence, greater freedom, closer contact with "the Supplier of true life." He emerges from that long and wondrous journey to find himself in rest and in work, a little child upon the bosom of the Father. In that most dear relation all feeling, will, and thought attain their end. Here all the teasing complications of our separated selfhood are transcended. Hence the eager striving, the sharp vision, are not wanted any more. In that mysterious death of selfhood on the summits which is the medium of Eternal Life, heights meet the deeps: supreme achievement and complete humility are one.

"In a last brief vision, a glimpse as overpowering to our common minds as Dante's final intuition of reality to his exalted and courageous soul, we see the triumphing spirit, sent out before us the best that earth can offer, stoop and strip herself of the insignia of wisdom and power. Achieving the highest, she takes the lowest place. Initiated into the atmosphere of Eternity, united with the Absolute, possessed at last of the fullness of Its life, the soul, self-naughted becomes as a little child: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.(Evelyn Underhill, "Mysticism," Unitive Life)